Music fonts and open standards with Daniel Spreadbury

Scoring Notes

Daniel Spreadbury returns to Scoring Notes for the final episode of the year. As one of the co-chairs of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, Daniel is responsible for maintaining and developing the Standard Music Font Layout, or SMuFL, an open-source common set of font specifications which he created. On today’s episode, Daniel talks with David MacDonald and Philip Rothman about the forthcoming updates to that standard, which in less than a decade has been adopted by many diverse and robust music applications. Daniel takes us through a bit of music font history, from the early days of Adobe’s Sonata Font, first-generation implementations in Finale and Sibelius, and the sequence of events that ultimately led to the development of the SMuFL standard and the creation of its reference font, Bravura, for use in Steinberg’s scoring application, Dorico. We also get a look ahead to technical improvements in Dorico that will soon allow it to run on Apple’s newest M1-based computers.

More on Scoring Notes:

• Daniel Spreadbury on music fonts: past, present, and future
• MakeMusic and Steinberg transfer development of MusicXML and SMuFL to web community group
• An interview with Robert Piéchaud about the November font
• An interview with Nor Eddine Bahha, musician and font designer
• A fount of fonts at Notation Central

Music fonts on Notation Central